5 ways Facebook changed us, for better and worse

By Doug Gross, CNN

Updated 1408 GMT (2208 HKT) January 31, 2014

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It has been more than 10 years of change for Facebook, the social network founded February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, right, Dustin Moskovitz and three other classmates in a Harvard dorm room. From its awkward beginnings to an international phenomenon with 1.4 billion users, here's a look at the many faces of Facebook.

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2004: Facebook launches – It was first known as "Thefacebook" when it launched at Harvard University as a way for students to connect. The social-networking site spread to Columbia, Stanford and Yale universities the following month, and the Facebook Wall made its debut in September. By December, Thefacebook had nearly 1 million users.

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2005: Students spread the word – The site grew beyond the Ivy League to include more than 800 colleges and universities by May 2005, and its official name changed from Thefacebook to just Facebook that August. Facebook began allowing high school students to join in September.

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2006: Meet the News Feed – By 2006, anyone 13 and up was allowed to join Facebook. That same year Facebook introduced the News Feed, which highlighted new updates and photos within your social networks. As they would after almost every major change, Facebook users revolted, starting a petition to change Facebook back. One petitioner said, "I don't need to know everything about EVERYONE."

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2007: Another new design – Facebook updated its site design in April 2007, moving friends, networks and the inbox to the top of each page and photos, notes, groups and events to a bar on the left. Facebook Platform launched in May, which allowed for developers to create third-party apps. (Another backlash erupted when those apps started requesting personal information.) Later that year, Facebook introduced ads, which convinced some users the site was going the way of MySpace.

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2008: New profile pages – Facebook profile pages were redesigned in 2008 to add five main tabs: Feed, Wall, Info, Photos and Boxes. The new design was, as usual, met with negative comments from users resistant to change. Facebook also debuted its Chat feature that year, allowing real-time instant messaging.

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2009: The 'Like' button – The "Like" button was introduced on Facebook in 2009, letting users show appreciation for clever status updates or pictures of their friends' cats getting into shenanigans. Cynical users demanded a "Dislike" button. Facebook also launched Pages to let fans follow celebrities, sports teams or causes.

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2010: Growing privacy concerns – Facebook introduced instant personalization, which gave partner websites information about users so they could personalize your experience. Advocacy groups like the ACLU reacted negatively to the new feature, saying users should have to opt in instead of getting the setting by default. Under pressure, Zuckerberg tweaked Facebook's settings to give users greater control over privacy.

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2010: Facebook adds 'check-ins' – Taking a cue from apps like Foursquare (and rival Gowalla, which it eventually bought in 2011), Facebook launched Places, which allowed mobile users to check in at their locations. The most "checked-in" spot? Disneyland.

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2011: Photos, photos everywhere – By February 2011, Facebook had become the Web's largest host of photographs. Over its decade, users have uploaded more than 250 billion photos to the site. And by the end of the year, it began scrapping users' Walls in favor of another layout change. Fast forward to 2012 ...

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2011: Facebook Messenger – Mobile users who want to message friends can do so using the Messenger app, introduced in 2011.

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2012: Hello, Timeline – In the spring of 2012, Facebook forced all users to convert to its Timeline profile layout, which arranged updates in chronological order, searchable by year.

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2013: Going mobile – By late 2013, Facebook reported that 945 million of its 1.2 billion users were visiting via a smartphone or tablet. After years as a Web-first product, Facebook began putting a new emphasis on mobile tools, growth and revenue.

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2013: Verified accounts – Following a trend made popular by Twitter, Facebook allowed select Pages for people, sports, media and government to become verified in 2013. The badges show a page's authentic affiliation.

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2013: Hashtags – Hashtags were introduced to Facebook in 2013. The hashtag was created on Twitter in 2007 as a way of pulling together different posts about the same topic.

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2015: Embedded Facebook videos – Facebook began competing with YouTube by allowing users to upload videos directly to the social network. In 2015, they also began allowing users to easily embed Facebook videos in other platforms.

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Facebook published this map in 2013 that shows its global reach. The lighter a country or region, the higher its concentration of Facebook users (note the black hole of China). But some believe the social network has reached a saturation point and is poised for a decline, especially among fickle younger users.

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Story highlights

Facebook turns 10 next week and has undeniably changed how many of us live

For many of those changes, there are positive and negative sides

In the Facebook age, there's rarely such thing as a long-lost friend

But some folks still haven't figured out etiquette of social sharing

Ten years and 1.2 billion users into its existence, there's no question that Facebook has changed our lives.

Whether it was an inspired vision, deft execution, a bit of dumb luck or a combination of all three, Mark Zuckerberg's social juggernaut has ingrained itself into the daily lives of digital-age users in a way that forebears like MySpace and contemporaries like Twitter could only imagine.

Which is not to say it's all "likes" and "shares" and happy kid pics. As with any new (or newly discovered) technology, the impact of the end product is largely in the hands of the user. We are, after all, only human -- with all the joy and sadness, decency and ugliness that that entails.

So here, as Facebook turns 10 on Tuesday, is a look back at five ways the social network has changed us -- for better and for worse.

Share! Share! Share!

The good: Wedding announcements? Thing of the past. Birth announcement? Just slap an Instagram shot of that bouncing baby boy or girl on your timeline.

Dating? Graduated? Bought a house? Got a puppy? Same deal.

We take it for granted now, but the ability to share major events with all the people closest to you with a single click of the mouse is unprecedented.

There were the Myspaces of the world before Facebook. But mom, your second cousin and Aunt Jenny weren't on them.

And it's not just the good stuff, either. Changing that relationship status to "single" can save you from those awkward "How's Joey doing? You two are so cute together!" conversations.

The bad: Overshare! Overshare! Overshare!

Seriously. Ten years in, some folks haven't figured out what everyone on their friends list wants, or needs, to know.

But the detailed updates on your mundane day are mind-numbing and the play-by-play of your 3-year-old's potty training is just -- too much.

We all want to know you got a wedding ring. The fact that you just polished the one you've had for 14 years? Not so much.

The past is not really past

The good: When a site has 1.2 billion users (OK, we all know some of those are multiple or abandoned accounts, so let's say at least a cool billion) it's a pretty amazing database of the world's Web-enabled population.

That means your odds of finding just about anybody are a heck of a lot better than they were 10 years ago.

For most of us, it's less dramatic than that. Childhood friends who moved long ago, college roommates who drifted away, even former teachers who served as inspirations are now but a quick search away. There's no doubt we have friends because of Facebook that we wouldn't have otherwise.

More than 80% of U.S. divorce attorneys say they've seen an increase in cases involving social media, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, and one-third of all divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook, according to a survey by Divorce Online.

Temptation is always out there. But with Facebook, it can be a little too convenient.

It makes you happy

The good: In 2009, a survey of 2,600 college students by researchers at the University of Texas showed that those who were the heaviest users of Facebook were the most satisfied with their lives. They also were more likely to be engaged socially and politically.

"For many people, there's an automatic assumption that the Internet is bad," associate professor Jeffrey Hancock said at the time. "This is one of the first studies to show that there's a psychological benefit of Facebook."

The bad: Or maybe it makes you unhappy.

Other studies have looked at aspects of Facebook use and the results have been less encouraging.

Last year, a University of Michigan researcher found that looking at posts by Facebook friends -- you know, the photos of smiling kids on vacation in the Caribbean or announcements about promotions, engagements and awesome nights on the town -- can make us feel sadder about our own humdrum lives.

"On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection," the study reads. "Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it."

As with many things, your mileage may very. But what's clear is that Facebook has become such a part of our lives that it tweaks our emotions, for better or worse.

Every day is a reunion

The good: Reuniting with classmates from high school or college has never been easier. Pre-Facebook, a class reunion committee looking to celebrate five, 10 or 20 years post-diploma faced a thankless task.

"Where does Jennifer live these days?" "Who has Steven's phone number?" "Do you know Wanda's married name?"

Now? One Facebook event invitation and you can focus on booking the best '80s cover band available.

The bad: If every day is a reunion, why have a reunion?

Actually reuniting with old classmates is losing some of its appeal when we know the names of the former theater club president's three kids and which character from "The Hunger Games" she'd be.

Timothy Davis, co-founder of reunion website Classreport.com, told the Baltimore Sun that he has noticed a drop-off in the number of reunions in recent years, particularly among folks in their mid- to late 20s.

"People I haven't talked to in years will see my wedding pictures on Facebook, then I'll see them in person and we won't say one word to each other ...," Rebecca Miller, a 23-year-old whose five-year reunion fizzled to a small party at the class president's house, told the paper. "Why go to a high school reunion when you're going to stand around and go, 'So, how did that doctor's appointment go yesterday?'"

Privacy

The good: For those willing to find and use them, Facebook provides tools that let you select who sees what.

So, while grandma is welcome to look at those pics of the kids playing in the snow, she might not need to be privy to your strongly worded rant about the cable guy who is two days late. You can direct that one instead to buddies with a proper appreciation for your expansive vocabulary.

Rival Twitter is designed by default to be a public forum, where you broadcast your 140-character pearls of wisdom to the world. Facebook allows that, too, but is more geared toward limiting your thoughts to certain family and friends.

The bad: Well, you know.

Security breaches have been a reality of many websites' growth. But as its user base grew dramatically, Facebook's problems (like the time CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg got his own page hacked) played out in front of a massive, and nervous, audience.

At the end of the day, Facebook benefits when you decide to share more openly. The details about your life that you share on Facebook are rounded up and compiled into a profile of you that helps advertisers target you with things they think you'll like.

So, when you announced your pregnancy and were, soon after, bombarded with Facebook ads for a bunch of baby stuff? That was no coincidence.

To be clear, Facebook is not handing advertisers information about you personally. But, somewhere, there exists a nameless profile of a user with your hometown, gender, age and likes and dislikes, just waiting to be used for marketing purposes.

That, in a nutshell, is the entry fee to use this remarkable social tool. Yes, Facebook has changed the way we communicate. Whether it is truly cost-free remains another question.